Depends, did said title get lots of advirtiseing? a commercial? promo items and all  that add up real fast.

Ls issues and payed employees and amount of time.. 

Don't think its as high as you think, Itlest last time i asked.

I don't think they've openly disscussed any of that actully. Or wont. Its been awhile.

Nov 2, 2009 -- 4:44PM, AtomixIGN wrote:

If a game sells 250,000 copies at "full price" lets say 50.00 us

That comes out to a total of about  12,500,000 worth of total business. 

Would it be fair to say apx 10,000,000  of that makes it way back to the publisher

 

A  Suggested Retail Price title is sold to a retailer at a price below that... typically around -.

On top of that, a publisher has to pay for the retailer's co-op reserve, defective allowance and carry a price protection reserve to manage inventory out of the channel. That's usually somewhere between 12% and 20% depending upon the publishers' forecasting abilities, how agressive they've been placing it and the platform and the title specifically.

So for a proper "net sales" figure, you're talking about $34ish  of that  making it to the publisher. At 250K units, you're looking at about $8.25M actually recognized by the publisher as a net sales figure.

THEN you have cost of goods sold (which is SIGNIFICANT on consoles but no, I can't share what those are for NDA reasons), product development spend, variable marketing spend, fixed marketing costs (staff), sales commissions, technology, licensing or development royalties, and SG&A (finance, legal, exec salaries and other overhead).

It depends entirely upon those other costs.

If it were a 360/PS3 game and it had a $10M PD budget and a $5M marketing  worldwide budget (both of which are VERY low figures), before you even factored in COGs (which is the largest single cost after retailer margin), fixed marketing, overhead etc. the game has lost $7M. With those other factors, it'd probably be  more like $11M+ underwater for most publishers.

If it were a $20M PD budget and a $10M marketing budget, you'd be $21M underwater, etc.

If it were a $3M PD budget and a 1M marketing budget, you'd be profitable, but I'm not aware of any 360/PS3 games with those sorts of budgets. :)

There are Wii games around the industry with those sorts of budgets (at both spectrums). Games often cost a lot more than you'd think to make.

One of the things that got me on this was the admission that Grand Turismo 4's costs are up to 60 million Dollars.  That and I see Muramasa sold about 140,000 copies.  I was hoping Vanillaware turned a profit.  Obviously they got a better deal from Ignition than they were getting from XSEED.